Tesla Re-draws the Map for EV Travel

This winter, through holes in the polar vortices, a few brave souls trekked cross-country along a new electric highway which winds from California to the Northeast. A route put together by Tesla Motors allowed a team of company employees to cut the coast-to-coast driving time for an electric vehicle to just over three days—more than three-and-a-half times faster than what was achievable in 2012. As the network expands, the coast-to-coast drive time will continue to shrink. As long as you have bought into their technology, that is.

Tesla Motors has been building up a national network of Supercharger stations for their Model S electric vehicle over the past year and a half. They first built stations in California, then stretched networks north and south along the East and West Coasts, and have just recently finished a transcontinental string of stations from southern California to New York. Rather than taking a straight shot, the string of stations wends northward through scenic western locales such as Moab, Utah, climbs through the Rocky Mountains, and then goes north to I-90 in around the Wyoming–South Dakota border, within distance of Mount Rushmore.

It’s about 800 miles longer than a straight shot between Los Angeles and New York. But lucky for any Minnesotans who own the Model S, our state received two Supercharger stops along I-90, in Worthington and Albert Lea, and there are a few others just across the border in South Dakota and Wisconsin.

One of the goals of Tesla’s founders has been to create a practical electric car to help us get off of carbon-laden fossil fuels. Tesla has taken a unique approach to making the electric car practical, something that’s still a work in progress despite some huge achievements already.

Most entrepreneurial efforts into the electric-car market have been built around low-end vehicles that weren’t even classified as regular cars because they were limited to low speeds or only had three wheels, but still ended up costing as much as a decent small car. Bigger automakers have struggled with finding the right vehicles to convert to electric operation, or to design entirely as electric vehicles. Entry-level cars fitted with electric drivetrains end up reaching mid-market or even upmarket prices, though the absolute costs have started to come down as sales of the most popular models have reached into the tens of thousands.

Tesla’s approach has been to start out at a higher price point, where the additional cost of specialized electronics and the bulky battery pack is a lower percentage of the overall cost. For their first car, the Roadster, they aimed at two killer features: A driving range of more than 200 miles, and a level of acceleration that competes with the fastest vehicles on the road. But it was a cramped two-seater with limited storage space—a fun, sporty vehicle, but not quite a daily driver.

The current Model S car is much more well-rounded. The all-electric drivetrain allowed designers to try new things because the big lump of an engine wasn’t in front anymore. In addition to offering a range of more than 250 miles per charge and still having tremendous performance, it is a larger 5-door sedan, optionally seating up to 7 passengers if the two rear-facing seats for children are included. It has won numerous awards, including matching the best score Consumer Reports has ever given for a car. The battery pack is slung low under the car in a “skateboard” arrangement, making the vehicle have an extremely low center of gravity—it’s very difficult to get the car to roll over.

So, for people who can afford it, Tesla has a compelling offering. Travel by car has by far the largest mode share in the country today, and it’s in all of our best interests to make sure that cars and trucks become as energy-efficient as possible. The company is doing a good job of breaking down the barriers that have held people back from buying electric vehicles in the past. But a couple of things keep me up at night: First, will Tesla or other electric-vehicle manufacturers ever be able to reach a price point that makes them broadly popular? Second, how far can we really get by converting cars to run on electricity? (Hydrogen- and methane-powered vehicles will also probably have some role to play.)

The answer to the second question is pretty clear—even if our entire vehicle fleet suddenly became much more efficient, it wouldn’t be enough to meet our carbon-reduction goals. We also need to change our land use patterns. I’m a big believer in using the tools of good urbanism to provide walkable and bikeable environments, and linking neighborhoods and cities with quality public transit networks using a mix of buses and trains. Even with that, we will probably need to find ways to effectively run our whole petroleum production process in reverse, pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequestering it underground in some form (in my mind, liquid is safer than the gaseous storage methods that have been proposed).

So, to circle around to the Supercharger stations again, I have to say that I’m almost wholly unimpressed with the places where these stations have been going in. While Superchargers offer the ability to recharge a Tesla vehicle very quickly (adding 200 miles of range to an empty battery in under 40 minutes), they’re usually located in suburban-style strips or the fringes of shopping mall parking lots.

Here’s the one in Albert Lea, four stalls in the parking lot of an AmericInn hotel just off I-90 (the first exit west of I-35). If you’re going to be waiting for your car to charge for 20 to 40 minutes, it would seem ideal to use that time to shop or grab a bite to eat. But the nearest food here is at Burger King, and it’s not a very walkable environment (no sidewalks):

Tesla Supercharger in Albert Lea, MN

Here’s the one in Worthington, six stalls in the parking lot of a Ground Round restaurant. There was one couple there sitting in their car waiting for it to charge, also in a sidewalkless suburban-style sprawl zone:

A Model S charging in Worthington, MN.

Of course, the Supercharger stations are located close to the highway, much like many regular filling stations. Sometimes they’re in the parking lots of restaurants, sometimes hotels. But in most cases, the stations are located only a couple of minutes away from nice, walkable central business districts.

One of the thing that frustrates me most about driving by car these days is the sameness that’s found wherever you stop. Mostly the same fast-food joints, with only faint whiffs of what makes a place unique.

Worthington has a decent central business district, a variety of 1- to 3-story buildings:

There were a number of Mexican and Asian restaurants and shops. I never would have guessed. I couldn’t quite figure out the language of this sign:

It isn’t all traditional buildings. As in countless other cities, it was clear that a portion of the town center had been torn down, in this case to make way for a fortresslike government center:

Some of the restaurants:

And, for good measure, the former train station, still used as offices by Union Pacific. Perhaps someday in my lifetime, they’ll use it again for passenger trains.

So if you were setting up stopping points for a cross-country adventure, which would you pick? I’m a fan of the walkable downtown—even in this small community, there was plenty to see in a short distance of the free downtown parking lot. Placing chargers in town centers would help reinforce those communities by bringing travelers to see something they wouldn’t quite expect otherwise, alleviating the blandness of the highway.

While I’m not a fan of their charger locations, it won’t impact me for a while. If and until I need to get a new car, and I turn out to be able to afford one of their next-generation vehicles, charging locations remain a question for Tesla and their existing customer base. Do their customers want to be stuck in their cars in unwalkable suburban landscapes while they wait to charge up, or will they demand something better?

Perhaps non-Tesla charging stations will take a hint and be placed in better locations, though that almost becomes a requirement for other vehicles. Most electric cars on the road in the U.S. today only take current from slower Level 1 or Level 2 chargers (basically 120- or 240-volt power), and take several hours to fully charge. Topping off doesn’t take as long, but still, if you’re going to be stuck in one place for a while, public chargers pretty much need to be in walkable locations.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever get a pure electric car. I’m an apartment dweller, which will make charging at home difficult for the foreseeable future. I’ll need some sort of fast public charging infrastructure, unless my building management decides to take the initiative and set something up themselves. Most existing electrics also only offer driving range of roughly 80-100 miles (sometimes only half that). I have a recurring need to drive 80-100 miles on relatively short notice, so I’ll either need something with a bigger battery or a growth in the availability of fast-charging infrastructure.

Tesla’s Supercharger network isn’t quite going to work either, at least for now—they’re currently Tesla-specific proprietary technology, not offered on any other vehicles. But even if another manufacturer licensed the necessary pieces, batteries would need to grow as well. Those chargers in Worthington and Albert Lea are 114 miles apart, farther than virtually any non-Tesla electric vehicle can go today. There is an emerging nationwide standard for fast-charging which should help cars with smaller batteries, but the chargers aren’t yet widely deployed, and very few cars have been built with the appropriate on-board connector.

It’s both amazing and disheartening to see how far electric vehicles have come in the last decade. Huge leaps forward have been made, but with many more still left to go.

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About Mike Hicks

Mike Hicks is a computer geek at heart, but has always had interests in transportation and urban planning. A longtime contributor to Wikipedia, he started a blog about trains and other transportation after realizing it had been two decades since he'd first heard about a potential high-speed rail line from Chicago to Minneapolis. Read more at http://hizeph400.blogspot.com/

9 Responses to Tesla Re-draws the Map for EV Travel

I’m extremely conflicted about the impending success of electric cars and it seems like you are too. They are definitely better than gasoline-burning vehicles, but if the electricity comes from coal plants it’s not a huge win… but that’s not the bigger point. This insane land-use pattern that we have concocted in the last 75 years is starting to buckle under its own weight, and I would be devastated if it’s able to prop itself back up thanks to electric cars. If they become a cleaner version of private vehicles that continue to become less important for everyday use – that would be great. Unfortunately, it seems even Tesla doesn’t share our appreciation for traditional building patterns.

I’ve been signed up for Windsource through Xcel Energy for a decade now, so I don’t worry about coal plant emissions much. I pay the company a little extra to offset my power consumption with purchases of renewable power. The extra cost has declined over time — This past month, it only cost me an extra 0.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, totaling an extra 67 cents for the whole billing period (not including taxes). Solar power generation costs are coming down, so we’re going to see a pretty dramatic shift in the way power is generated and distributed in the coming years/decades.

Solar and other renewables typically need some sort of power buffering system (batteries, flywheels, water pumped to elevated reservoirs), so the battery technology being developed for cars may also be used for that purpose. I do worry about the byproducts of battery production, but I don’t have enough knowledge about that to do much more than hand-wave about certain possibilities.

But yes, in my view, the best option to cleaning up cars is to start getting rid of them, and to do that, we need to change land-use patterns by stopping sprawl in cities of all sizes, and ensuring there are quality alternatives to driving.

Even without programs like Windsource, which I recommend to any aspiring electric vehicle owner, electric vehicles are still generally cleaner due to the efficiency of the motor. Here’s a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists that addressed this exact concern.

I believe electric vehicles will generally help rural towns rather than direct people to truck stops and fast food. The very fact that it takes half an hour to charge, without battery swapping, will encourage better meal choices. With my Nissan LEAF, we’ve certainly bought rural, sit-down meals while waiting on a charge. The next LEAF is expected to reach 150 miles, but the charge speed hasn’t grown much so it remains a day trip car.

Absolutely. I mean, I’m not even a car person but I can’t help being a huge Tesla fan boy. I think what they are doing is awesome and I love that they are totally upending the car industry. It’s exciting too to see solar, wind, and others get closer and closer to parity. I’m just hoping that the dream of human-centric urban living isn’t pulled out from under us once again.

It would be nice to see little urban supercharger stations geared towards electric compact and city cars. I feel that electric power stations can be designed to fit better in with the urban fabric compared to traditional gas stations since they don’t have to worry about massive underground storage tanks for fuel.

That’s a great point, especially since underground fuel tanks often leak and leave a big mess to clean up down the line, which often makes redevelopment difficult. Chargers can be much more easily removed/relocated.

Small convenience stores could mixed be into other buildings (or stand-alone but still directly connected to the sidewalk with either angled or parallel parking for electric charging stalls.

Since we mostly pre-pay for gas already, the charging machines could have a built-in credit/debit card machine if they ever have pay-to-charge stations (which probably will happen). If you ever want to pay with cash, either the machine could take cash or the you could pre-pay in store to a cashier.

I suspect that Tesla not placing their Superchargers in great-destination locations is intentionally so that customers will use them quickly and move on. If a customer is doing anything interesting in shops or restaurants etc., they are likely to occupy a charging stall longer than they need to. That could lead to some competition for the stalls. And it would probably cost more to provide the real estate for the Superchargers in the neighborhoods of interesting businesses. It’s more economical for the system as a whole to get the necessary charge with a minimum of “stall squatting”, and then to drive on to the interesting destination. Competition could change this of course. Another car company could place more interesting locations to steal away some of Tesla’s business. That’s probably a few years away though.

I agree that society needs to drive less. The electric car is not a panacea. But, in my experience, the range budget of an electric car leads one to consider travel decisions more thoughtfully, in the same way that a financial budget results in more thoughtful purchases. The unlimited range of ICE cars seem to be taking us in the opposite direction, with people driving much more than we should. It amazes me to think of the percentage of household income the average person spends on transportation. We need cars with the capabilities of a Tesla Model S to entice the average person to switch to EVs. But most people could do just fine with the capabilities of a Nissan Leaf if they thought about it.

I’m not a big fan of current public charging systems. Problems with cost and competition for stalls need to be solved. Charging at home is liberating. Charging in public is constraining, at least with current capabilities. Ubiquitous charging could greatly increase the utility of my little Leaf, but at what cost? I believe the current offerings are too expensive to be successful. But if they are too cheap, that incentives stall squatting and other wasteful behaviors.

I don’t know why so many of these Superchargers are so poorly located.

I’ve driven my Tesla Model S from Ithaca, NY to Grand Rapids, MI, via Canada, before there were any Superchargers. I would have preferred to take the train, but it wasn’t practical (look at the Amtrak map if you want to know why it wasn’t practical).

The “level 2 chargers” in Canada are, on the whole, very nicely located. They’re in the parking lots of places you would want to go to, downtown… but they’re in the worst *part* of the parking lot, ensuring that they don’t get filled up immediately by ICE cars.

The entire Supercharger deployment as a whole is unhelpful for upstate New Yorkers like me, and I will probably never get to use any of them unless Tesla changes its plans. Winter range is shorter than summer range, and it’s impossible to reach the nearest Supercharger from Ithaca; there is also no meaningful “level 2” charging heading south or southwest, either. I’ve asked the company to put a Supercharger in downtown Erie PA but they’ve been ignoring me.